second best is good enough. or is it? i'm sure it is. or am i?

Sometimes Cykill just seemed better than Megatron. His name had the word 'kill' in it, afterall.

Sometimes the imitation is better, sometimes it's worse. For example, I'm the only person in this dimension willing to entertain the possiblility that Cykill and Crusher, villains from the Gobots, were creepier and scarier than their Transformers counterparts.

Now, many kids were under the illusion that the Gobots (also known as The Mighty Machine Men) were a rip-off of the Transformers. Not so. According to my copy of Toyland: The High-Stakes Game of the Toy Industry (1990), Gobots actually preceeded the Transformers, and if anything, the Transformers ripped off the Gobots, at least initially. They just did it better than the Gobots.

Didn't it hurt when she crashed into things? Crasher actually seemed to enjoy it.

Then the question is, which is better? Work or Work for the Dole? As far as punishments go, WftD isn't the worst thing I've ever had to do. The worst punishment I ever got was having to come to school during a public holiday for stealing reams of paper to photocopy role-playing manuals (this was during my brief affair with role-playing games. It didn't last long, I promise). I was made to weed the gardens.

When I used to work in a supermarket, I once had to spend the day removing a plastic sign with paint stripper. The chemicals burnt through the flimsy rubber gloves and onto my hands. Work for the Dole is the mental equivalent of that. Sitting under these fluro lights in front of a poor quality computer screen, it feels like the entire cast of Fame are wearing stilettos and are dancing in my eyeballs.

Oh sure, I'd like to say something all revolutionary like "you shouldn't have to choose between forms of oppression", but opting out isn't an option. WftD has vastly crimped my lifestyle. I'm actually entertaining the possibility of trading my labour for a wage.

It's obvious to anyone who thinks about it that the dole is also a wage-labour form; my job is to compete in the labour market to drive down wages and to act as a threat to the employed in exchange for centrelink payments. Clearly things like WftD are designed to make the main alternative to labour (the dole) seem that much more unattractive, and the consequences for those actually in such programs are almost inconsequential, aside from the necessarily public humiliation. In short, this shit is so bad, I'm thinking about looking for work.

To be continued...